The Republican Party is facing a growing perception problem, with a racial epithet in Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s past now the latest in a string of incidents that calls into question where social conservatism ends and intolerance begins.
Perry’s presidential campaign is now engulfed in the controversy surrounding his family’s lease of a hunting camp called “Niggerhead,” a name prominently painted on a rock just outside the Texas property. Perry said his father painted over the name when he leased the property in the early 1980s, but the Washington Post reported neighbors’ claims that the name was still visible in the mid-1990s.
Regardless of when it was painted over, the name of the camp provides more fodder for Democrats eager to portray Republicans as intolerant and looking to “turn the clock back” on the nation’s social progress, as President Obama told supporters.
“I need your help to fight for equality,” Obama said at a fundraiser in the District on Saturday. Republicans “don’t want to just stand in our way but want to turn the clock back … to return to the days when gay people couldn’t serve their country openly … [and] who, as we speak, are looking to enshrine discrimination into state laws and constitutions.”
Democrats have already tried to portray Republicans as captives of what they call the “extremist” Tea Party movement, and Obama will adopt similar tactics during his re-election campaign, according to a memo released by his chief campaign strategist.
“Extremism will be a foundational issue in this campaign and racial intolerance will be part of that profile,” said Darrell West, vice president of government studies for the Brookings Institution. “Democrats will point to a variety of ways in which it believes the GOP is insensitive.”
GOP strategist Cheri Jacobus says perceptions of Republicans as intolerant are a fiction perpetrated by Obama and “mainstream media.” Democrats “are trying to paint the Republican Party with that big ‘R’ that means something other than Republican,” Jacobus said.
“At this point, the term ‘racist’ has become no more than a political tool of the left,” she added. “It’s rather disgusting.”
Democratic strategist Douglas Schoen argued that “the facts speak for themselves” after members of a GOP debate audience last month booed a gay soldier when he asked a hostile question.
“Republicans are anti-immigrant, have hardly been inclusive of gays, and have largely written off African-Americans,” he said.
Tolerance is certainly a tough sell for the GOP, which must remain loyal to its socially-conservative base, West said.
“I don’t think Republicans will tout their tolerance,” he said. “But they should condemn intolerance because that’s something that is of general interest to the electorate at large.”
Businessman Herman Cain, the only black in the Republican presidential field, is the only candidate to react to revelations about Perry’s hunting camp. He called it “just plain insensitive to a lot of black people in this country.”
“The silence is deafening,” West said. “It looks like this issue remains very sensitive within the Republican Party. Otherwise you would have immediate cause of protestation.”
